For the next few Sundays, we are going to focus on our relationships in our community in a series, entitled, Won’t You Be Our Neighbor? We are asking many of you to read The Art of Neighboring as we progress through the series. This is a light read that you can move through in a matter of a couple of hours. In fact, one of the simplest pieces is this tool: where you are asked to identify the names of your 8 closest neighbors. As we have been preparing for this day, our staff called this “the chart of shame.” In a recent survey, one-fourth of those surveyed indicated they had no one to talk to. Part of the problem is we are no longer rooted but we move and move and move again in an increasingly mobile society. We can be compared the life of a tourist, someone who is always moving, never belonging. Always interested in collecting experiences, but remaining superficial and disconnected from permanency. We drop into a rich but small book tucked away toward the end of our Bibles.
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. 13 By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 17 By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:7–21).
Part of the reason John is writing this letter is to enrich the relationships within the church.
1. Love is an Import
Your car is from Detroit and your TV is from somewhere in Asia. But love is an import from heaven. Love comes from above. There can be no tariff on love, for we would get in a “trade war” with heaven itself. The word “love” occurs thirty-two times in some form between 1 John 4:7 – 1 John 5:3 and 53 times in the entire letter. There’s an incontrovertible logic to John’s message.
Let me show you his logic in three steps.
1.1 The Source of Love is God
“…for love is from God…” (1 John 4:7b).
Love comes from God for look again at the end of verse eight: “…God is love.” Did you know the source of love is God? Light comes from the sun because the sun is light. Heat comes from fire because fire is heat. And loves comes from God because God is love. Love comes from above. Love flows from or out of God and has God as its spring or source.
Do you know why God created anything? God wasn’t lonely and He made you because He needed you – no, no, no, and a thousand times no! Instead, He created you for you to share in His happiness. God made you out of love in order that you may share in His happiness.
Dorothy Sayers
Dorothy Sayers wrote detective novels around a fictional character Lord Peter Wimsey. The daughter of a pastor, she was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford in 1915. Whimsey was an aristocrat detective from the 1930s who solved all kinds of crimes. But he was an unhappy, bachelor until a Harriet Vane shows up and saves him. About halfway through the detective series, this woman suddenly appears in the series, Harriet Vane. Dorothy Sayers looked at her character, Lord Peter Wimsey, and saw that he needed someone to help him out. So who did she put in there? Harriet Vane. It is thought by many that Vane is recreation of Sayers herself, the author of the series. In real life, she was a detective novelist, a woman, and one of the first women to go through Oxford. She put herself into her own stories. Here is a woman who had all the same characteristics as the author. She looked into the world that she had created and she fell in love with her chief character, Peter Wimsey, and she wrote herself into that story so she could heal him. Harriet Vane saves him. That’s what God did for us. God looks at us harming ourselves. He sees how we are broken, hurting, and aimless. And He writes Himself into our story. He sends His Son into our story to save us. He lovingly wrote Himself into our story.
1.1 God is Love
1.2 Becoming God’s Child
You’re not automatically God’s child. You only become a child of God through the cross of Jesus Christ: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
Did you know God, the Father, because of the actions of His Son, Jesus Christ? I want invite you to embrace God’s free gift of forgiveness through the cross right now. And while many claim to be God’s children, God’s children think like their Father, react like their Father, and act like their Father.
Wouldn’t it be a surprising thing to know the eternal destiny of every one here this morning? If we had the magical ability to create a giant MRI machine where we didn’t see what was inside you but your eternal destiny… Some of you will never see the gates of Pearl except from an awful distance. It’s one thing to receive an invitation to experience God’s love through the cross but it’s another thing all together to respond. Won’t you respond to God’s invitation right now?
1.1 God is Love
1.2 Becoming God’s Child
1.3 God’s Children Share God’s Nature
“…whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God…” (1 John 4:7b-8a).
God’s children take on God’s nature. John says this positively before he says in negatively in verses seven and eight. The Bible is really clear: my love for Christian brothers and sisters is a distinguishing mark that I am a disciple. In fact, the one who does not love is a stranger to God: “Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling” (1 John 2:10).
“By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother” (1 John 3:10).
“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death” (1 John 3:14).
“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11).
The logic is incontrovertible.
1) God is love.
2) Those who have been born again are children of God.
3) God’s children share God’s nature.
2. Four Tests to Evaluate Your Love
“In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:9-11).
The word “manifest” in verse nine literally means to display publically. The cross is God's flashing neon sign that God loves you. The cross is not only the demonstration of love; the cross is also the definition of love. You see, love has very special characteristics that make it true love.
2.1 True Love Is Sacrificial Love
God gave His one and only Son. When God gave his very best, He spared nothing in bringing us salvation. You have to sacrifice in order to love. Love costs. It cost God his only Son to love this world. “For God so loved the world He gave His only Son.” It cost Jesus his life to love the church.
“Husbands love your wives even as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25).
When God sacrificed His Son on the cross of Calvary that was the supreme definition of love.
2.2 True Love Is Selfless Love
Real love is always a love that seeks to meet the needs of somebody else. It was a selfless love that sent Jesus to the cross.
2.3 True Love Is a Satisfying Love
“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
The word propitiation is a very strange word to us but when you learn it’s meaning it is one of the most moving words in all of the Bible. It literally means “satisfaction.” You see, even though God is love, we are also told in 1 John 1:5 that “God is light.” Now light refers to the purity of God. It refers to the holiness of God. God’s love is a holy love. Now that simply means that God could not love the sinner and yet allow his sin to go unpunished. That in a nutshell is what propitiation really means. He took the wrath that we deserved upon Himself so that we might live through Him. It had to be that way because God is a God of holiness and a holy God cannot allow sin to go unpunished. So at the cross the light of God's holiness met the love of God's forgiveness and gave to us who want it the life of salvation.
2.4 True Love Is A Sharing Love
“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:11-12).
At its essence, God’s love is to be share through us. The kind of love that marks a true Christian is a sacrificial, selfless, satisfying, sharing love.
Prayer
Lord, you have shared with us your great love and we are undeserving of you. You have loved us at a great cost to yourself. You have promised us your love, an eternal love – a love that continually chases us down through all of our peaks and valleys. You have told us that if we receive your love, then we are to share your love. Father, search our insides this day and show us who needs your love.
Transition to Lord’s Supper
Of course, all is because of Christ’s death on the cross for us. The only way we can really love is because we are powered by God’s love to us and through us. He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for One dark Friday gave away to one bright Sunday.
